It’s well known that being employee-owned is good for a business.
But why stop there?
Why not make your business employee-run too?
Enable every employee to be ‘a Boss’ with a Customer Experience Score.
You business will be scalable, replicable, durable.
And you can plan to disappear.
A hedgeful of birds makes a right old racket. To our ears at least. But for the birds, each species hears what it needs to hear loud, clear and beautiful.
A Customer Experience Score describes a client journey into and through your business. It’s an end-to-end process, ideally run by a single individual.
Of course clients don’t arrive in sync, and they all take individual paths through your business. That means that as you take on clients, and people to serve them, the sound of your Score being played becomes a right old racket.
To your ears, maybe. For the client, it’s music, loud, clear and beautiful.
So resist the tempation to ‘tidy up’ what you hear from the inside. Beauty is in the ear of the listener, and it very much depends on where you’re standing.
Why do we enjoy playing Dungeons and Dragons?
Because we know the rules. We know the world we’re operating in. We know our own capabilities. We know there is randomness, provided by the dice. And we know that the people we’re playing with know all that too.
Within that framework, each one of us can play freely with the skills we’re given and the attributes we acquire. We can collaborate, go it alone, or switch between the two. If we’re Dungeon Master, we can even change the rules.
Nothing is predetermined, there’s room for the unexpected, yet everything is coherent. It’s a safe space enclosing the perfect balance between constraint and freedom, between box and creativity, between process and play, between community and individual.
Life can’t be like this.
But work can.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
The joke hidden in the game of ‘Mornington Crescent’, played to inscrutable rules on ‘I’m Sorry I haven’t a Clue’ – is that actually there are no rules. The teams make them up as they go along.
It’s an old parlour game, a jolly hoax played by a group of friends on a newcomer. Hilarious for the friends. Bewildering for the newcomer.
And it’s probably what joining your business feels like.
You don’t see The Rolling Stones following a score. Because they know the music by heart.
That doesn’t make every performance the same. On the contrary, knowing the ‘original’ by heart means they can play with it, tweak it, customise it in real time for the audience in front of them.
At first, you need a score, so you can share with everyone in the band what needs to happen to make your music.
But the score is the beginning, not the end.
“Design your business, or it will be designed for you.”
In other words, if you don’t decide ‘how things get done around here’, other people will decide that for you. At best it will be your team, but it could end up being your toughest suppliers, or your most demanding customers.
You didn’t start your business to dance to someone else’s tune.
Better get your own written down then.
The genius of a composer like Mozart, is that no matter who plays his music, or what they play it on (even a synthesiser), you know it’s Mozart.
The genius of a musician like Grappelli or Menhuin, is that no matter what they play you know it’s Grappelli or Menhuin.
A genius musician playing a genius composer amplifies the experience of both. And shows other musicians and composers what can be achieved.
It’s the score that makes this amplification possible.
Every musician get’s told what notes to play, what mood to create. No less, no more. The how is completely up to them – as long as it delivers the required experience, or better.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
In a business, striking the right balance between control and freedom is hard.
We want the serendipity that freedom brings. To be open to emergent behaviour or trends. And increasingly, we want our workplaces to be human, places where people can exercise their natural powers of creativity, collaboration and problem solving to the benefit of the customer and the company.
But emergence without direction or foundation simply turns into entropy.
The answer is to make sure the culture doesn’t only live inside people’s heads.
Document your Promise of Value as a compass to guide everyone on your journey.
Install a floor through which nobody can fall.
Capture the high-level process as the clue that will get everyone (especially newbies) through the labyrinth safely.
Then set your people free.
For Adam Smith the pin factory, with its production line and strict division of labour, was the epitome of efficiency. It meant that thousands more pins could be manufactured, which in turn meant more people could afford to own them.
Until eventually a pin became the epitome of worthlessness, a thing you wouldn’t bother to pick up if you dropped it. The factory model solved a production problem.
Products aren’t the only thing we make through our work. We also make people. And since Adam Smith, we’ve also known that the pin-factory approach makes unhappy people.
Humanity no longer needs to be efficient. We no longer have a production problem.
We have a distribution problem. We have an unhappiness problem. And we have a survival problem.
It’s time then, to look for a different mode of production.
One where the survival of our species is the side-effect of work that produces lives well lived for all.
We can start from the bottom up, as we grow our own small businesses:
Think orchestra, not pin-factory.
Your business doesn’t have to get big. It should however, be capable of lasting longer than you do. Of continuing to make and keep its (your) promises long after you’ve gone.
Otherwise, all there is to sell when the time comes is your customer list.
How do you think your customers will feel about that?
The good news is that scalability equals saleability.
Which means you really can sell up, not out.